Death of American Virtue - Ken Gormley [18]
With that, Starr placed the phone down and walked into his judge’s chambers, where he “bawled like a baby.” In this wood-paneled room filled with U.S. Reports, where he had typed out hundreds of opinions on his computer and immersed himself in the rule of law in many complex yet wondrous cases, Judge Kenneth W. Starr believed he had found the ideal life. Years later he would confide, “I didn’t want to leave that court. But I did try very much not to—like Lot of biblical times—to look back, but to keep looking forward.”
Ironically, Starr was mindful that accepting this position as solicitor general might hurt, rather than enhance, his chances of ever being appointed to the Supreme Court. No matter how sterling a lawyer’s won-loss record as solicitor general, a high-profile position like this could become a “lightning rod,” especially in modern times. Yet Starr still accepted the post as solicitor general.
“I am very blessed to have a sense of Providence in life,” he said. “And so, I viewed this as entirely entrusted to decision makers that the future was not in my hands. My job was to try to do the very best that I could.”
It was that same sense of obligation to public service, and Providence, that led Starr to accept the invitation to become Whitewater independent counsel six years later.
BY this time, in the summer of 1994, when Ken Starr embarked on a new challenge as Whitewater independent counsel, he would never imagine that a sizable chunk of the American public would one day view him as a Clinton hater and a Republican apparatchik. Alice Starr would say of stories that painted her husband as a political zealot out to get the president: “We don’t run around in a circle of any vast right-wing conspirators. We never have. We have dear friends (both Democrats and Republicans), almost all of whom are family friends whom we know from the children’s schools or from church or whatever. But neither of us are into a right-wing conspiracy and never have been. And Ken never, ever met with people who conspired about anything.”
Indeed, even after her family endured death threats, after U.S. Marshals shadowed the children to school, and after unrelenting public criticism, Alice said that her husband never lost his sense of obligation to complete his job: “Well, I mean, there was just a huge stress and strain on Ken. He couldn’t bring this home. He had to leave it at the office. He worked seven days a week, twelve hours a day, and he was frustrated.” Alice summed up the scandal that seemed to have no endpoint: “The whole thing was unpleasant. For him to have to be the person who has to be the prosecutor investigating a president in these kinds of circumstances—Whitewater was one thing.… But the Monica Lewinsky scandal, boy, he sure didn’t want that. Didn’t ask for that. And in hindsight, he tells me that he never would have taken it on had he known what it entailed.”
Nor did Alice see her husband as a “Clinton hater” who was out to topple the president. “Never hated him, because he doesn’t know him other than the few times he’s met him where he’s been cooperative, likable, agreeable. You know, the fact that he [Clinton] was probably lying on several occasions, well, that’s Ken’s job to bring the facts out, they come out where they may. But his job wasn’t to hate him or try to convict him. His job was to bring out the facts. He did do that and didn’t relish his job at all. It’s really the worst job he’s ever, ever had.”
William Jefferson Clinton and Kenneth W. Starr, two unusually talented Southerners who grew up in modest circumstances, each with ambitions to rise to great heights in public service, were born of the same time and place in American history. The story of how their paths collided so forcefully, dividing the country into warring factions, is the story of how politics